APIs
What tools minimize costs for a video-to-text service while maintaining quality?
Answered by Ask AgentGid from our data on Oct 10, 2026. Prices change: check the linked pages before you buy.
Recommendation: Extract the audio with ffmpeg and send only that to a speech-to-text API. For the lowest cost, start with hosted Whisper on Groq. Use Whisper V3 if accuracy matters more than price. Then test on your own videos.
| Option | Price (per hour of audio) | Free tier | Pick when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Groq Whisper V3 Turbo | $0.04 | Yes, rate-limited | Cheapest hosted option |
| Groq Whisper V3 | $0.111 | Yes, rate-limited | Better accuracy: WER 10.3% vs 12% for Turbo (as reported by Groq) |
| Together AI Whisper | $0.09 ($0.0015/min, converted) | None stated | You already use Together |
| AssemblyAI | $0.15 (+$0.02 diarization) | Up to 185 hours pre-recorded | Speaker labels, no card needed |
| OpenAI gpt-4o-mini-transcribe | $0.18 ($0.003/min, converted) | None stated | You want the OpenAI SDK |
| Deepgram | $0.258 ($0.0043/min, converted) | $200 credit | Streaming or other voice features |
| faster-whisper / whisper.cpp | No fee; you pay for compute | Open source | Very high volume or privacy needs |
Tips - Extract mono, 16 kHz audio with ffmpeg and skip the video upload. This is much smaller and stays under Groq's 25 MB free-tier limit (100 MB on the dev tier). Split long files into chunks. - Groq bills a 10-second minimum per request, so avoid sending
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Written by an AI model from AgentGid's data and can be wrong; AgentGid does not test products itself. The question comes from a visitor and was rewritten without personal details.